The networked computing environment (e.g., cloud computing environment) is an enhancement to the predecessor grid environment, whereby multiple grids and other computation resources may be further enhanced by one or more additional abstraction layers (e.g., a cloud layer), thus making disparate devices appear to an end-consumer as a single pool of seamless resources. These resources may include such things as physical or logical computing engines, servers and devices, device memory, and storage devices, among others.
Providers in the networked computing environment often deliver common business applications (e.g., business applications having the same or substantially similar scope, function, and/or application) online, which can be accessed via a web service and/or software, such as a web browser. Individual clients can run virtual machines (VMs) that utilize these common business applications and store the data in the networked computing environment. However, these VMs can sometimes be subject to attacks. These attacks can take the form of a denial of service attack, in which resources of the VM are overloaded to prevent the VM from performing its function, a vulnerability in the underlying technology of the VM that allows someone unauthorized access to the VM, a brute-force hack into the VM by a hacker, and/or the like.